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Not everyone that programs is versed in decompiling, digital forensics, reverse engineering, etc. Anyway, so your means of forming trust in a compiler faithful

by lrvick 2y ago

Not everyone that programs is versed in decompiling, digital forensics, reverse engineering, etc. Anyway, so your means of forming trust in a compiler faithfully compiling code, is to trust a decompiler to faithfully generate human readable source code followed by a lot of manual review labor repeated by every user that wishes to distrust the maintainers. Okay, but a decompiler could be backdoored as easily as a compiler to hide malicious code vs inject it . How do you get a decompiler you trust more than the compiler you are reviewing? Do you decompile the decompiler with itself? Back at the trusting trust problem. Decompilers are way more complex than anything in the hex0->tinycc bootstrap path.

fuhsnn 2y ago
> Anyway, so your means of forming trust in a compiler faithfully compiling code, is to trust a decompiler to faithfully generate human readable source code No, it is to fully audit the binary of a compiler itself, if you don't trust a decompiler, learn to read machine code, the output from a simple C compiler tend to pretty predictable. > manual review labor repeated by every user that wishes to distrust the maintainers. Yes? What's wrong with that? Anyone wishes to distrust, you give them the tools and knowledge to verify the process, the more people able to do this the better.
- lrvick 2y ago
  It is going to be a heroic shared win of the entire community if we get people to even do basic review of dependencies in languages where we have the actual source code. Trying to get people to ignore the source code and actually decompile and review every binary they use on every computer they use, including the decompiler somehow, is a lost cause. We should expect only a few people will review code, if it is drive-by easy to do. That means proving the binaries for sure came from the published commented formatted code, and then go review that code.

by lrvick 2y ago

fuhsnn 2y ago

> Anyway, so your means of forming trust in a compiler faithfully compiling code, is to trust a decompiler to faithfully generate human readable source code No, it is to fully audit the binary of a compiler itself, if you don't trust a decompiler, learn to read machine code, the output from a simple C compiler tend to pretty predictable. > manual review labor repeated by every user that wishes to distrust the maintainers. Yes? What's wrong with that? Anyone wishes to distrust, you give them the tools and knowledge to verify the process, the more people able to do this the better.

lrvick 2y ago
It is going to be a heroic shared win of the entire community if we get people to even do basic review of dependencies in languages where we have the actual source code. Trying to get people to ignore the source code and actually decompile and review every binary they use on every computer they use, including the decompiler somehow, is a lost cause. We should expect only a few people will review code, if it is drive-by easy to do. That means proving the binaries for sure came from the published commented formatted code, and then go review that code.